No Man’s Sky: How To Make Money On The Galactic Market

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The galactic market will become an integral part of your No Man’s Sky spacefaring adventures almost as soon as you can access it. Selling goods at a premium is one of the best ways to make money quickly, and buying whatever you need from the market is probably the quickest way to progress through the game’s crafting tiers. Here’s how to do both in the most efficient way possible.

The galactic market is accessed via distinctive Galactic Trade Terminals, which look a bit like the AI personality cores from Portal 2. You can find them in every space station, and in planetary outposts, so once you get off your starting planet you’re never too far from one.

No Man’s Sky: supply and demand

Successful trade is all about understanding supply and demand, and each star system will value commodities differently. It would be realistic if the prices were determined by local resource availability, but in our experience so far the correlation between the two phenomena seems erratic at best.

Anyway, when you reach a new star system, you can check local prices at the Galactic Trade Terminal at the space station. You’ll notice that all prices are given a percentage relating to the galactic average: when you’re selling, over-priced items are marked green and under-priced items red. When you’re buying, it’s the other way around, so remember that green numbers always indicate a good deal. A gold star indicates an especially good deal; you can feel well-pleased with any bulk sale of starred goods.

A fantastic way to get rich quick with minimal effort and movement is to check the store of your local space station for a high-price commodity like Dynamic Resonators or Vortex Cubes that are being bought for 100%+ their regular price. Find one of these and then simply dash around the visiting spaceships in the hanger, buying up their supplies of said item, and sell them off for almost double the amount back at the terminal. It’s dull busywork, but in just a few minutes you’ll make millions.

In general, whenever you enter a new system, check what’s in demand and mine accordingly. And don’t forget about the alien merchants you’re able to meet on planetary outposts and in the space station – each has their own set of prices, so if you need to offload some cargo but you’re not happy with the market rate, look around for nearby ships and see if you can get a better deal from their occupants.

We had some Chrysonite burning a hole in our exosuit, but the space station didn’t want it enough. Luckily, we found this dude parked outside.

No Man’s Sky: How to make money from crafting, aka everyone loves bypass chips

We’re sure there are plenty of cost-efficient item crafting hacks that turn cheap components into profitable secondary goods, but it’s hard to conceive of any that are more efficient than bypass chips.

These useful trinkets reveal important points-of-interest via planetary signal scanners, which possibly explains their galactic average value of 3,575 units. When you consider that you can craft one from a meagre 10 iron and 10 plutonium, which you can gather in bulk for free from almost any planet, they represent a solid (if rather dull) money-making scheme for the early game. (If you’re interested in the maths, plutonium is valued at 41.3 and iron at 13.8, so 10 of each is worth 551. Thus, simply holding down the crafting button multiplies the value of a chip’s components by a whopping 648%!)

Ready for a crafting spree

Fill your ship’s inventory with iron and plutonium (so you have lots of room in your suit inventory for chips), then head to a trade terminal and get crafting. If you’re going to use this trick, find a system with high rates for bypass chips and maximise your No Man’s Sky inventory space to make each run more efficient. Note that the rate of return in this approach is probably outpaced by mining large stocks of gold, aluminium or emeril, so by the time you’re finding planets with rich deposits of these minerals, you can stop flooding the galaxy with cheap electronics.

2 Comments

The best way to make money is to find a space station and trade highly valued goods with the pilots.

Specifically find a space station where either the station or one of the pilots highly values Dynamic Resonators and the pilots sell them. Then just buy low and sell high. You can buy at 30k a pop and sell at 50k. When I only had a tiny suit and ship (9 spare slots in suit, 5 in ship) I managed to make well over three million an hour doing this. After two hours of this I then bough the 30 slot ship of the dear Gek Captain Namo who was buying all these resonators for a little under 5 million.

The station in my starting system offered a gold star (+96% or so) for bypass chips. Essentially, I got an excellent start to my game financially.

In retrospect, I probably “should” have ground those out a bit more than I did, but I was desperate to explore new planets and new systems. I’m not going to regret wandering off and playing the game, including having to struggle a bit.

I’m in my third system now and I’m running short on cash, mainly because I’ve been buying suit upgrades thick and fast (and a 20-slot multi-tool is rather handy to boot).